About kottke.org

Founded in 1998, kottke.org is one of the oldest blogs on the web. It’s written and produced by Jason Kottke and covers the essential people, inventions, performances, and ideas that increase the collective adjacent possible of humanity. Frequent topics of interest among the 26,000+ posts include art, technology, science, visual culture, design, music, cities, food, architecture, sports, endless nonsense, and carefully curated current events, all of it lightly contextualized. Basically, it’s the world’s complete knowledge, relentlessly filtered through my particular worldview, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails.

kottke.org has helped influence the design and format of social media on the web since its inception. In 2000, the site introduced the permalink as a deliberate design feature, now the atomic element of social media. kottke.org has been cited in hundreds of books and academic publications and was one of the first blogs covered in major media like the New Yorker. In 2005, work on the site was 100% funded using a patronage model that anticipated services like Kickstarter and Patreon. The launch versions of both Gawker and BuzzFeed were partially based, in design and function, on kottke.org. The site has helped discover and popularize many emerging ideas and media forms, including tumblelogs in 2005, about a year and a half before Tumblr launched.

About Jason

I love the Web. I discovered it in college in 1994 and have been designing, programming, and writing online like my life depends on it ever since. In the 90s and 00s, I designed and developed sites for 3M, E*Trade, Target, and Charles Schwab. I designed Gawker for its launch, including the logo, which I’m proud to say a) lasted the entire tenure of the site and b) was photoshopped being bodyslammed by boyhood hero Hulk Hogan. I designed a font called Silkscreen, which has been used by Adobe, Volvo, Britney Spears, Herman Miller, and in The Bourne Legacy.

My work on kottke.org has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Wired, and dozens of other media outlets. I was an early advisor to BuzzFeed and helped them hire two key early employees. I’ve headlined at SXSW Interactive and spoken at MoMA, Ars Electronica, and Webstock. In 2005, I was a Senior Fellow in the R&D Lab at Eyebeam. In 2011, I designed and built Stellar (closed down in July 2016) to make it easy for people to discover great things online.

You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Wikipedia. I’ve lived in WI, IA, MO, MN, CA, NY, NH, VT, and, briefly, France. I currently live in Vermont with my two kids. I don’t have a plan. But I still love the Web.

Contact Jason

You can email me at jason@kottke.org or try to catch me on Twitter. I get a lot of messages (too many to reply to), but I read everything I receive and will try my best to respond if a response is necessary. If you send me something on Facebook I probably won’t even see it because I don’t spend a lot of time there.

If you’d like to send me something, email me and I might send you my address.